Norton Utilities 15 Registry Defrag

I installed Norton Utilities 15 on my computer, Windows 7 Home Premium x64, ran Registry Cleaner, then ran Registry Defrag. It ran, said it could compact registry, and it needed to restart to finish, allowed reboot. Computer will not boot, I can only get to a System Restore point but it says I need to enable Sys Protection - I'm sure it was enabled. Any ideas to recover without going back to an old image?

Hi  @dabneyk (Ken),

 

Welcome to the Norton Community!

 

Sorry for the Inconvenience that you are facing :smileysad:

 

I've sent you a Private Message (List Private Messages) with few instructions to follow, Please check it when you get a chance. 

 

 

I just wanted to give an update. I realize I could have done a much better job naming this thread. It should have been "Norton Utilities 15 Trashes Windows 7 with Registry Defrag". I was able to search around on Norton Community and found my exact same problem, except 4 years ago it was done by NU 14.5.
 
http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/Norton-Utilities-14-5-crashes-Windows-7-after-Registry-defrag/td-p/179228?view=by_date_ascending
 
I read through all the posts and followed the recommendations. Basically I needed help and confidence to get from a computer that failed to boot, to finding my backup registry files so I could use them for the repair. I didn't know where they were - they are in C:\windows\system32\config.  There were 5 files to check: default, software, sam, system, and security. I was looking for .rmbak versions. I had a little trouble when I got to the command prompt, my C:\ had no registry files - none, my X:\ had registry files but they were as old as my computer. I finally found that D:\ was actually my C:\ when normally operating. Maybe someone else can explain this.  Anyway, in my case I had only two of these backup registry files: default.rmbak and software.rmbak. Both had the same date as, but were much larger than my active files. Since I was in that dir, I performed the following:
 
ren default default.old
ren default.rmbak default
ren software software.old
ren software.rmbak software
 
I rebooted and my computer came back up with everything working. First thing I did was make a newer system image.